Childcare is what Oz mums dislike the most

Melbourne, Jan 13 (ANI): The only activity that Australian women hate doing is caring for their kids, a new study has revealed.

A study into parents’ moods has found that, especially women find caring for their kids the most stressful, frustrating or boring in their daily lives.

It also showed that women feel more positively about their jobs than men, although for both sexes, paid work ran second to child care as the most negative activity of the week.

The study further found that working parents were at their happiest when engaged in socialising, community activities, voluntary work or care, education and recreation.

Peter Brown, study author, from Griffith University’s Centre for Work, Organisation and Wellbeing, is intrigued by the result that women feel more negative about childcare, and more positive about paid work, as compared to men.

“The conventional stereotypes of men being breadwinners and women being the carers; in terms of positive effect, it’s the reverse of what you would expect. Maybe it’s that familiarity breeds contempt,” the Age.com.au quoted him, as saying.

According to him, the findings suggest that parents should pursue a third dimension to their work/family balancing act, by including more me-time and leisure activities.

“The fact that much leisure is played out in a social context, the importance of contact with others, that’s the stuff that makes us happy and healthy,” he said.

The study involved 173 parents, who worked part-time or full-time, carried a personal digital assistant with them for seven days.

Ten times a day at random times, the device would beep and the parents would record what they were doing, whom they were with, where they were and how they felt about the activity.

It was found that the parents, particularly the women in the younger age group (25-30 years), felt more time-pressured than those in the older group (52-57 years).

In the study, overall, the older parents scored more highly on the positive scale but the mood scores showed all participants felt reasonably happy about their time use.

Professor Brown found that younger parents with dependent kids spent more time on child care, while the older group spent more time in paid work and social activities. (ANI)